Cataclysm

“What I liked about prog didn’t seem to be what most prog fans liked about prog,” Flying Luttenbachers mastermind Weasel Walter once said. “I wanted to hear only the gnarly parts.” Heavily informed by free jazz and No Wave in its early years, the shapeshifting outfit took on a more metallic edge by the early 2000s, arriving at an aesthetic that Walter usefully termed “brutal prog.” This era of the band peaked on 2006’s Cataclysm, in which an all-star lineup featuring guitarists Mick Barr (of Orthrelm, Octis and later Krallice) and Ed Rodriguez (of Colossamite, Gorge Trio and later Deerhoof), Burmese bassist Mike Green and Walter himself on drums tore into the leader’s hyper-obsessive yet ruthlessly coherent compositions with noise-punk gusto. Moving from frenetically mathy barrages to spacious, dissonant webs of unstable sound (including a skin-crawling cover of the fourth movement of Olivier Messiaen’s 1930s opus L’Ascension), the album is both an endurance test and a delight for any sonic extremist who always wished that bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Gentle Giant sounded that much more bloodthirsty.